Technology companies care mightily about network effects – the idea that the more users participate in your service or use your software, the more valuable it becomes. Think about Facebook each time a friend of yours joins it, or the availability of applications on Microsoft Windows vs. Mac.
Earlier in my career, I had the good fortune to work at a Fortune 200 company whose products were especially sensitive to network effects among a very specific group of people: software developers. Over time, the pressure to interact with this community became greater and greater, to the point that we launched one of the world’s first corporate blog networks so that our engineers could reach out to the community.
Of course, that also presented a huge number of challenges. Our engineers were hardly publishers, yet we needed to optimize our outreach investments so that our engineers weren’t spending too much time fussing about their blog posts. Graphics needed to be created, best practices needed to be established – a lot of work!
We utilized a hub-and-spoke model, where a centralized team built our tools and reached out to interested members throughout the company. Our mainstay software (as a service) was Omniture, which is best thought of as Google Analytics on five rounds of steroids. It allowed us to test the effect of a link versus a linked image (+40% or so), various page layouts (multivariate testing), etc. Rudimentary stuff for a publisher, but as more and more companies need to build relationships with the customers, such corporate communications tools will become even more important.
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